Over the last few weeks, Emma interrupted her stay in Cairo to attend the first Worldwide Women’s Forum on Globalization in Mexico and had a series of important meetings in New York. As of October 9th, Emma is the Chief of the international team of observers responsible for monitoring elections in Ecuador.

The patrimony of battles and hopes we have come to know thanks to the nonviolent initiatives of Olivier has been enriched with experience and has led to numerous subscriptions, urging the opening of a “front” in Southeast Asia.

On September 21st, we launched World Day of nonviolent struggle for freedom and democracy in Vietnam. According to our friends, this was the first-ever mobilization of non-Vietnamese people since the Vietnam war. This day of non-violent opposition was supported by over 4000 people from 103 countries and involved hundreds of people demonstrating outside Diplomatic Missions of Hanoi in a dozen cities to put an end to the Vietnamese war against freedom and democracy, but also to force European institutions to urgently respect their legality and thereby ensure that the so-called “human rights” clause is implemented and the rule of law respected.

The largest Radical Demonstration on September 21st last was organized in Washington D.C. thanks to the immediate participation of over 600 Montagnards, 70 of which are members of the Party, and which involved speeches by Kok Ksor, Vo Van Ai, Wei Jingsheng and anti-prohibition leader Arnold Trebach.

Professor Trebach decided to once again subscribe to the Transnational Radical Party after a number of years of absence, on June 26th to celebrate the world day against drugs and reestablish relations with radical anti-prohibition militants. We decided to re-launch the International Antiprohibitionist League with him and others who joined the IAL in the early 1990s to re-propose reform of the UN Conventions on drugs; starting from Europe. Over the last few months, Marco Cappato, MEP has launched a transnational network of Parliamentarians for Antiprohibitionist to coordinate a political mobilization in view of the assessment of five years of Pino Arlacchi’s drug-related UN policies.

Since last July meeting of the General Council in Rome, we have also made significant progress on our researches and proposals for scenarios concerning the globalization of democracy. During our Congress in Tirana, we will discuss and approve a document to be presented by Emma Bonino at the second meeting of the Community of Democracies in Seoul next month. A group of our researchers - including Professor Ahmed Ziauddin and fellow TRP members Mariacarmen Colitti and Matteo Mecacci - spent the whole summer working on a document, which is now ready and will soon published online. This texts contains a survey of existing organizations and mechanisms on Human Rights and provides a series of proposals regarding a world organization of democracies for democracy. This proposal - which Emma will present to the 107 countries attending the Seoul meeting- is the one that will be adopted by the Congress.

At the same time, in Tirana, we will need to formalize the decisions made during the first session of the Congress in Geneva regarding our Statute creating a Senate for representatives of all the Radical Associations. We should also outline future initiatives and plan an extraordinary Congress in New York involving the participation of scores of representatives from oppressed populations, as announced in July.

In these days we are publishing at www.radicalparty.org drafts of the reports and motions prepared by Members of the Committee of Presidents Danilo Quinto, Sergio Stanzani, Oliver Dupuis, Marco Cappato and Marco Perduca. We encourage you to read them and promptly send your comments in order to commence debates on our proposals as well as on other pre-Congress documents that will soon be available.